The New Pictures

Blood Alley (Batjac Productions; Warner). Spare the celluloid, according to Director William A. ("Wild Bill") Wellman, and spoil the picture. His last three films (Island in the Sky, The High and the Mighty, Track of the Cat) have run to an average length of two hours. Encouraged by the business they brought in--The High and the Mighty has already grossed more than $7,000,000--Director Wellman has apparently decided that when people go to the movies they want to kill time, no less than to live dangerously. In Blood Alley, he gives them plenty of chance to do both. The picture is not only long (1 hr. 55 min.), but also in a cheerful, stop-me-if-you've-heard-this way, it stirs up plenty of tarnation, too.

"Blood Alley" appears to be sailing-Latin for the 300 miles of Chinese coast that lie between Amoy and Hong Kong, and through it, in this picture, an entire Chinese village of 180 souls flees from Communist tyranny to democratic freedom in "the most daring mass escape of modern times." The odd odyssey is made in a grubby old wood-burning sternwheeler, built in 1885 and capable of six knots in a following wind. Her captain is a Yank (John Wayne) whom the village elders have sprung from a Communist brain lavatory. Resisting psychological detergents in a unique way, ex-Prisoner Wayne has stayed anti-Communist by remaining pro-female; whenever the Reds got too rough, he paid them no mind, just conjured up an image of "Baby," a composite of the girl-in-every-port, and chatted with her. Wayne pilots his old tub by night and fog, through storm and boiler stress, gun fight and slugfest, not omitting to make Mao's navy look like a fleet of Sunday oarsmen. But what matters most is that the end frame finds the hero safe in port (Lauren Bacall).

Director Wellman has set up in his CinemaScope panel some splendid images of human mass in roil and flow, and Cameraman William H. Clothier has almost magically cajoled California into looking like China, with the gauzy seascapes, the abstract arrangements of seines in sunlight and the ochred skies. But the blunt point of the pictute is to display John Wayne to best advantage--stripped in a bathtub, bloody at the wheel, phlegmatically stirring his bayonet around inside a Communist. As usual, he makes a more convincing display than most of Hollywood's he-men can. And when Lauren asks him why he killed a Communist soldier, surely only Wayne could get away with that roast-of-beef expression and the puzzled reply: "Seemed like a good idea."

Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (Russ-Field; United Artists) is a sort of shequel to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the movie musical based on the book and play by Anita Loos. Unfortunately, Brunettes offers no more than the top half of the composite girl of so many adolescent dreams. Jane Russell is present in all her mezzanine majesty, but Jeanne Crain cannot offer the customers any such full line of attractions as Marilyn Monroe.

The script tries hard to play it fast and Loos, Jane and Jeanne, a couple of nightclub singers, take their act to Paris, where they are met by Scott Brady and Alan Young, two young men about down, and by Rudy Vallee, a fading ember who knew the girls when they were their own mothers--or so it looks in the flashbacks. For a while everybody vaguely engages in dialogue ("Allons, enfants! let's go cher-cher les dames!"), and then off on a CinemaScope tour of Paris.

When they come to the Rodin Museum, Jeanne and Alan stick their heads through the noble statue of The Burghers of Calais and smooch a little. Jeanne, as she bats those baby-blues at The Thinker, declares, "I wonder what he is thinking about." After that, nothing matters anyhow. Jane Russell keeps trying to give Scott Brady, her agent, the other 90% of her; and both young women sing, as nowadays most lady vocalists do, in a peculiarly unpleasant morning voice. The hoarseness is apparently intended to suggest that the girls have taken large doses of sin in their time. In this case, it sounds more as if they had taken small ones of Sterno.

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